Monday, December 09, 2013

95

imagine you
are held responsible for much of the misery that the general population is
suffering.

well
normally this would be a case for max clifford, but he is otherwise engaged at
the moment. this is a tad unfortunate for our members of parliament as they are
on the verge of accepting an £7,000 pay rise (11% increase).

now you
would think that the one group of members of parliament that would be up in
arms about this use of public money would be the conservatives – so quick to
criticise those on benefits: the shirkers who take benefits. yet the
backbenchers of the tory party seem very quiet on the issue. (not that i hold
out much hope from the labour members either).

the argument
for the pay rise is simple: pay more money get better candidates. (of course
this is an argument that doesn’t work when you get to lower levels of pay
rates, it only seems to work at the top), the implication being that the
current lot are not up to the job as they are accepting below the ‘market rate’
for the type of job they are doing.

in case you
have forgotten the basic pay of a parliamentarian is £66,396, or to put it
another over twice the national average wage.

the problem
for parliamentarians is that the body that is about to announce the pay
increase is the independent parliamentary standards authority (ipsa), and they
don’t need parliamentary agreement to implement the changes (quite how that
works i don’t know).

while they
are an independent body they are pretty much part of that circle of people that
parliamentarians belong to, plus they are also of a class of professionals who
also stand to gain if salaries of parliamentarians increase because they can
then justify their own future increases. (why are you calling me cynical?)

even ipsa
realise they are on a bit of a sticky wicket as they have managed to ensure
that there is a special definition for parliamentarians of ‘office holders’
that means they are not the same as public sector workers, and so are not bound
by the pay constraints that have been imposed on such workers. (nice to have
friends in the right places).

ipsa doesn’t
have members of the public on its board. it is likely that the closest that
they have come to speaking to the general public is to ask for a menu in the
restaurant or to remind the cleaner to do a better job next time if they want
to get paid.

now i don’t
believe people should be going into politics to make a huge wage packet. i want
them to become members of parliament because it is a vocation for them. i don’t
believe that you do not get quality individuals just because the basic pay is
only £66k, if we believed that we would be making sure that teachers and nurses
were getting a lot more to ensure we got better people in those roles as well.

nor does a
greater wage guarantee you get the best – just look at the quality of the
financial sector some very very well paid people who somehow managed to
engineer a financial disaster we are still struggling to get out of. or just
think of serco, g4s or a4e where the executives are very well paid but somehow
the companies are dicey.

just the
sort of people i want to be in charge of the country.

while mps
don’t have max to help them they have received some succour from a serial
letter writer to the london evening standard. ‘like it or not,’ writes dominic
(he is also an ‘author’), ‘i believe mps should get the proposed 11% salary
increase. we should, however, expect a pro rata performance. for peanuts you
get monkeys. with a handsome salary we can all – in theory – look forward to
handsome results and an end to austerity. or so the theory goes.’

any man who
can call £66k peanuts is divorced from the reality that the majority of us have
to live in, and that alone is a good enough reason why parliamentarians should
be paid salaries that are closer to the national average than further away from
it.

yet when
push comes to shove i suspect that they will all accept it and say they are
worth it.